Devin is a BI consultant at Pragmatic Works Consulting. Previously, he has tech edited the book Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services and was an author in the book Knight's 24-Hour Trainer: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services. Devin has spoken at past conferences like PASS and at several SQL Saturday events. He is a contributing member to the Business Intelligence Special Interest Group (SIG) for PASS as a leader in the SSIS Focus Group. Making his home in Jacksonville, FL, Devin is a participating member of the local users’ group (JSSUG).

When developing Reporting Services reports that use Analysis Services as a data source you may find that it is difficult to dynamically set default parameter that are passed into the dataset being used. It turns out this is a lot simpler to do then many people think. In this post… Read more

Data Warehouse latency is often a complaint I have heard from end users when trying to access data via either Reporting Services reports or Excel. Generally, I promise 24 hour latency unless the job mandates updates hourly or even sooner. Screenshots for this blog are available at my regular blog…Read more

Reports that use an Analysis Services cube as a data source can often have performance problems during pre-execution.Before you even see the classic Report is being generated sign the report is slow to start.

The most common reason I’ve found for this performance lag has to do with…

I decided to do a little performance testing on some common SSIS “Tricks” that increase speed and effectiveness of SSIS packages. I wanted to define to what extent just one simple change could make to a package.

So in this test I decided to show the difference in using a… Read more

I had another chance last week to answer an email follow up question from the session Brian and I gave at PASS. This made for a great blog opportunity so I thought I would write about using Fast Parse in SSIS. Hopefully I can explain it even more basic then… Read more

I have decided to make a short series of blogs about possible interview questions to help you prepare for an interview. Last time I wrote about basic DBA questions. Today I have given you some basic SSIS question to study. These basic SSIS questions will give you a starting point… Read more

This is just a starting point for you to prepare for your interview so make sure not to limit yourself to what you find here. These answers could easily vary but generally someone who is interviewing is looking not only for a correct answer but confidence in your answer. If… Read more

Last week I wrote a set of Advanced SSIS Interview Questions. Here are the answers I came up for these. Of course you may have some variation of what I have and I would love to hear how you would answer these. Feel free to email me how you would… Read more

This is part 1 of my 29 part series called Better Know A SSIS Transform. Hopefully you will find the series informative. I will tell you a little about each transform and follow it up with a demo you can do on your own.

This is part 2 of my 29 part series called Better Know A SSIS Transform. Hopefully you will find the series informative. I will tell you a little about each transform and follow it up with a demo basic you can do on your own.

Using a Deployment Manifest in SSIS allows you to deploy a set of packages to a target location using a wizard for installing your packages. The benefit to using it is the nice user interface that a wizard provides. The disadvantage of using it is it’s lack of flexibility. When… Read more

This is part 3 of my 29 part series called Better Know A SSIS Transform. Hopefully you will find the series informative. I will tell you a little about each transform and follow it up with a demo basic you can do on your own.

While in the process of developing SSIS packages it’s likely you will deal with errors occasionally unless you’re the Superstar developer that never makes mistakes. Of course your first steps to deciphering the problem is to look at either the progress/execution results tab in BIDS. The problem with viewing error… Read more